1) McCain has no chance. He got 14 percent in Iowa and will probably "win" NH with 35-40 percent and then get 15 percent in SC. Unlike Huckabee or even Rudy outside of the NE, McCain in a know quantity and most Republicans don't like him. In fact, they hate his guts. Probably 50 percent of Republicans would crawl on broken glass to vote against him.

2) A McCain v. Obama would be a Republican disaster. The MSM would start pointing out McCain flaws, and eventually McCain would go into cranky old Bob Dole mode and demand Obama "stop lying about my record" and launch a few feeble remarks about how Obama is weak on National Defense and never was in a NV prison. Since McCain actually agrees with Obama on most issues, it would be hard for McCain to energize the base. The tired, McCain campaign would start losing air and finally go flat, ending with an easy Democrat victory.

In a general election McCain would be the beneficiary of the percolating overall consensus that Obama just too green and not ready for prime time or the world stage. Once Obama starts talking about him immediately pulling all troops out of Iraq and about other foreign policy matters, he's toast. But it's hard to see how McCain ever gets the R nomination. Four years ago there was serious speculation by many on the right that Kerry was going to ask McCain to be his running mate, and that McCain would accept it if it was offered. That's telling as far as McCain's standing amongst the Republicans.

"Four years ago there was serious speculation by many on the right that Kerry was going to ask McCain to be his running mate, and that McCain would accept it if it was offered. That's telling as far as McCain's standing amongst the Republicans."

Actually, Kerry DID offer McCain the VP, and McCain after "thinking it over" and further discussion with Kerry, declined.

Also, former McCain staffers assert McCain was going to leave the party in 2002 and cross the aisle. There were serious negotiations about him doing this. However, Jeffords beat him to it, and McCain decided to stay a "R".

If McCain was elected how many Democrats would he put in his Cabinet? I wouldn't be surprised if he put Kerry at DoD, Lieberman at State, and Feingold at Justice.

I heard Obama one night talking about reparations. But does he ever write about it? Is it in print somewhere? He wasn't very specific about details: how much per person, how it who would orchestrate the reparations process, how it would be guaranteed to be going to the right people, etc.

If you gave even 10 grand to 10 million people, how much would that cost, and how much would the bureaucratic side cost? Would the people who received ten grand have to pay taxes on the money they received?

Kirby, please document that. Otherwise, this looks like an underhanded rumor. I don't think there's any chance the U.S. government is going to start just cutting checks to every black person, and I'm suspicious of any effort to stir up the belief that that is what Obama wants.

I heard it on TV while surfing. I'm pretty certain that he meant it, but none of the details were clear. I think he was talking to an exclusively African-American group on one of the big channels like CNN?

Someone asked him about reparations, and he said he was for it, but it wasn't clear how the money would be distributed. I don't think he got into details, but maybe he did.

Probably everybody has forgotten this thread, Ann. I remember now that the station I saw this on was C-Span and it would have been last summer when Obama wasn't yet the phenomenon he's become. And C-Span does run shows from months before, so it could have been a program from last winter, that ran over the summer. Was it a film of a convention about the Union of Black Americans? That's what I recall.

I googled "Barack Obama" and Reparations, and there were 42,000 hits! There's consistent mention of an article in the November 14, 2004 Chicago Tribune, which says that Obama is for reparations, but not in the form of direct checks cut to individuals. It doesn't say what, though, and I've been unable to find the original article.

Maybe someone else can follow up here. There's a lot of very far right blogs saying he is for Reparations, which cites that November 14, 2004 Chicago Tribune article, but no one actually quotes it. When I did find one page that purported to have the article itself, it said error on page, article couldn't be opened.

I think he's for it, or has been for it, before certain groups, in the past, but has perhaps refined his position since I first heard this. I should have done the research first.

I'm sure Hillary's team can find it. Otherwise, it will have to wait until he's the frontrunner, and then the Republicans will definitely find everything they can on this.

But, I'm certain that I didn't make it up.

One thing I did find that surprised me but which you probably already knew: Obama was the editor of the Harvard Law Review. That's very impressive. That fact makes me very sympathetic toward him.

At any rate, the legal aspects of reparations must be a nightmare. Maybe if this comes up in the future you could give us a rundown on the legal aspects. I'm sure someone has attempted to think this through, but I can't imagine how such a program would work without becoming an enormous morass. It seems that there is at least some evidence that Obama has flip-flopped, or perhaps you could say, refined his stance, on this issue.

Here's a bit of footage from MSNBC where Obama says he's not in favor of individual reparations, but in favor of educational loans. It isn't clear to me what he means.

In the current issue of Ebony magazine, he says that he thinks educational loans should be forgiven. Is this what he means? It's still kind of unclear to me that this is what he means by reparations. In Ebony he doesn't specifically say that this would only be for African Americans, but maybe that's what he means. I don't know for sure.